I folded the napkin into my pocket and sat with what I was feeling, which wasn't concern -—concern was my job -—but respect, and under the respect, something I didn't have a cleaner word for: the awareness that I was tracking her the way you track a person you can't stop watching, that my body registered where she was in the room before my eyes did, and that a woman who handled a death threat by logging the time and going back to work was going to occupy a part of my head I wasn't going to get back.
THE BAR EMPTIED ATtwo. Staff filtered out. Huck locked the courtyard gate and left with one look in my direction that said he'd be back tomorrow and I'd better still be doing mine.
Then it was us and the quiet.
She was wiping down the back bar. I was on a stool, running the unknown number through a search that wasn't going to tell me anything useful. The ceiling fans ticked overhead. The sudden absence of noise had weight to it. Two people who'd been circling each other all day, and the crowd that made it manageable had just left.
"Can I ask you something?" she said, not looking up.
"Go ahead."
"What made you leave the Marshals?"
The easy answer was loaded and ready. Better money, fewer government forms, nobody shooting at me from the passenger seat of a Nissan Altima on I-10. I had the timing down. The grin, the laugh line, the deflection built right into the joke so nobody thought to push past it. I'd been using it for three years and it worked on everyone.
I started to give it. Then it stalled.
She was looking at me now. Rag in one hand, the other flat on the bar. Her eyes were doing the thing they'd been doing since yesterday morning, cutting past the charm and searching for whatever I held behind it. People liked the surface I gave them. They were happy with it. She looked at it like a lock she intended to pick, and she wasn't in any hurry, and she wasn't going to stop.
"I lost a witness," I said.
The words were out before I'd decided to say them.
"Three years ago. Detail in Memphis. A bookkeeper who'd turned state's evidence on a trafficking ring. I ran a clean operation. Good protocols, tight logistics, a safe house nobody should have found. Somebody found it. Put a round through the kitchen window and she died on a tile floor in a house that was supposed to be invisible."
Jenna didn't move. Didn't flinch or reach for me or offer me a drink or say any of the things people say when they don't know what else to do.
"I stayed two more years," I said. "Took every assignment they handed me. But every time I walked into a new safe house I saw that floor. So I left. Went private. The work's the same. The stakes are the same. But when I lose someone now, it's mine. Not a system I stopped trusting."
She was still for a long time. Then she folded the rag, set it on the bar, and said, "What was her name?"
Nobody I'd worked for had ever asked me that.
"Beth," I said. "Beth Kessler."
She nodded once. Acknowledgment without pity, without comfort, just someone who'd asked a question and listened to the whole answer. She picked the rag up and went back to wiping down the bar, and the silence that settled between us was different from the silence before. The wall I'd built between myself and every client I'd ever worked had a crack in it, and I could feel the air coming through.
SHE KILLED THE LIGHTS. I held the door while she locked up. We walked the two blocks home through the thick of it -—Carnival noise pouring off Bourbon, the streets still packed, a brass band playing a tune that was filthy and slow on a corner while couples danced drunkenly in the street. The air was warm and wet and heavy with the river and fried food and jasmine from a planter overhead. A bleary-eyed young fool stumbled past singing what might have been Marvin Gaye, and Jenna sidestepped his without breaking stride. Her boots clicked on the sidewalk and her shoulder brushed mine when she moved back into line, and I caught her scent underneath the bar smell -—warm skin, faintly sweet, the amber and citrus that lived in her hands from eight hours of pouring. She didn't pull away. Neither did I. The heat of her arm through her sleeve stayed on my skin for a full block after the contact broke.
Neither of us talked. Less circling now. More open. More dangerous.
At the apartment she went inside, kicked off her boots in the hall, and disappeared into the bedroom. The lock turned. Same as last night.
I sat on the couch. Boots off, holster on the side table where I could reach it without thinking. The velvet was warm from the apartment's heat and I pressed my back into it and closed my eyes.
I'd been doing this for years. Assignment after assignment, city after city, women I noticed and didn't stay for. Attraction went in one place. The job went in another. The exit -—the packed bag and the clean goodbye -—lived in the back where I never had to look at it until the detail ended and I drove away. The system worked. It had always worked.
I tried to put Jenna Darby away.
Her hands on her bottles, fast and certain. Her mouth losing the fight against the smile when the cat text landed. The drop of water tracing her throat and my gut pulling tight watching it disappear. Her standing in front of that window, backlit and defiant, daring me to do something about it while I turned back to the coffee maker like it needed my attention. And the question,What was her name?, asked like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like it hadn't occurred to her not to ask.
I could tell myself it was proximity -—shared space, shared adrenaline, a few months without being touched. I could tell myself any woman who looked at me the way she did would've landed the same. But the woman in Charlotte hadn't made my hands shake. Hadn't made me say Beth Kessler's name out loud for the first time in three years.
This wasn't proximity. This was Jenna.
She wouldn't stay where I put her. She kept coming back, sliding out of the neat compartment and settling right in the center of my head where she took up all the room, and I lay there on the couch and listened to the city and knew -—the way you know when a detail has gone sideways and the plan you madeisn't the plan that's going to save you -—that this was already a job I wasn't going to drive away from clean.
Chapter Three
